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Roose Bolton in TRoC (book spoilers)


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It totally sucked.

1. Roose was bitch-slapped and ran away like a pussy.

2. They took away his awesome armour.

3. The sword thrust and the phrase were badly staged, too fast, not enough focus, like merely an afterthought.

Face it they screwed it up, like they did Ramsay's last appearance ( and his entire plotline for that matter).

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Death was awesome in Supernatural, probably my 2nd favorite character after Lucifer (who also had a snarky side)

Agreed. I like you, French!

It totally sucked.

1. Roose was bitch-slapped and ran away like a pussy.

2. They took away his awesome armour.

3. The sword thrust and the phrase were badly staged, too fast, not enough focus, like merely an afterthought.

Face it they screwed it up, like they did Ramsay's last appearance ( and his entire plotline for that matter).

1. Yah getting out of the way of musician-assassins is stuuupid. He was enjoying being a troll. Getting a smack was worth it.

2. He didn't leave to get his armor. There wasn't much special except the pink cloak, but pink's not their color in the show.

3. A bit fast, but not enough to really bother me. Doing it all slow and dramatic would be like every other show so I can understand them making it more realistic.

Roose had me grinning anytime he came onscreen. I think Ramsay's plotline shouldn't have kept his identity secret but besides the weirdly filmed Theon rape, Ramsay's scenes have been awesome, if a little disconnected. Rheon and Allen have great chemistry.

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On the topic of how he killed Robb:

Again it's the way it was directed. Roose ducking in, stabbing Robb and then ducking back out fit the whole tone of the slaughter. It could have happened slowly, where you get long drawn out shots of blades being unsheathed and Robb preparing to die, like when Ned was beheaded. In this instance though, I think the quick shots and fast pacing helped move the shocks forward quickly and effectively. It wasn't entirely unlike a character getting "whacked" on The Sopranos, where all you get is a BANG and a body falling over.

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1. Yah getting out of the way of musician-assassins is stuuupid. He was enjoying being a troll. Getting a smack was worth it.

I didn't say it was "stupid", but it was pathetic and didn't fit Roose's character at all. Yes he behaved like a troll - a BAD troll who can't help grinning before the joke is done, who gets slapped like a bitch and runs away tripping over his own feet. This is NOT how it happened in the book AT ALL, and is a total disservice to Roose, not to mention simply badly staged and therefore losing a lot of impact on the viewers.

He didn't leave to get his armor. There wasn't much special except the pink cloak, but pink's not their color in the show.

You are wrong, in the book Roose DID leave to don his dark plate armour, when he came back he even had his visor down so Catelyn didn't recognise him at first. The guy Cat caught hiding chainmail under his clothing wasn't Roose but Edwyn Frey.

As for pink - make it blood red for all I care, make it black or any other menacing color. But as it stands now, it just doesn't cut. In the book Roose and Ramsay both wore scary Bolton armour for the critical parts of the plot (sack of Winterfell and Red Wedding), which symbolized their sudden transformation into key villains and amplified their impact as characters. In the show Roose looks like one of the faceless nobodies, he doesn't have any distinguishing feature as impactful as his armour in the books, and television is a visual media first & foremost, so failing visuals means failing a big part of the show.

3. A bit fast, but not enough to really bother me. Doing it all slow and dramatic would be like every other show so I can understand them making it more realistic.

Yeah, and doing it fast would also be just like any other show (case in point - Sopranos). Also, they did incomprehensibly slowed down at some points, i.e. Rob standing up and talking to Cat while full of crossbow bolts was needlessly (and unrealistically) drawn out. But anyway, the issue isn't between fast and slow, it's between win and fail. Book version = win, TV version = fail, reason: they crammed everything up too much and tripped over their own feet, resulting in an incoherent, mumbling and weak performance doing a disservice to the original.

That said, I did enjoy the Shakesperean sudden deaths and silence at the end. However, this doesn't remove the fact that Roose's part was botched.

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I always pictured roose wearing his pink cloak with hood on top, slowly closing in (camara focus on the back), then taking off hood and ran Robb through with a long sword

He wore a visored helmet in the book. The armour itself is well descriped in ADwD, where Ramsay mistakenly thinks the guy wearing the Bolton family armour is Roose.

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It was a sick game with Catelyn, OP. Despite many people's mistaken view of him as a pragmatic robot, Roose is very cruel. His cruelty is just more refined and subtle than his son's. He is cold as ice, but that does not mean he doesn't have amusements or sense of humor. The Roose Bolton many readers seem to envision would not have stepped into the hall and stabbed Robb. He did that both for its symbolic value and because it amused him to give Jaime's regards. I am a huge Roose fan and I did not find his subtle mindfucking of Catelyn out of character at all.

And he "scurried away" because he didn't want to be hit by crossbows, people :dunce:

The swiftness with which he dispatched Robb fit into the scene in general - it was all very fast.

:agree:

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Haha. That scene was not out of character.

Roose is just a troll. We saw how he trolled Jamie earlier in the season about his sister's fate. And this scene, true to his troll self, he just cannot, CANNOT, help himself from spoiling the Red Wedding for the unsullied viewer (Catelyn). Seriously, 5 seconds before the RW Roose?!?! He deserved to get smacked.

On a more serious note, is Roose really a fighter? I thought he was just a survivor. Isn't that why Robb sent him to fight Tywin? Didn't he spend that part of the war strategically retreating? And doesn't he later hide in a wagon for fear of getting shot with a poison arrow by Reed's people? The fact that he scurried out of the room is not out of character.

Further, Catelyn needs someone to slap the hell out of at that point. The need for her character to do that - to a character the TV audience knows - supercedes the need to make Roose Bolton look like a badass. The audience will get to learn more about Roose for a long time to come. That was Cat's final moment. And in my opinion, Roose is not some macho villain - just a sociopath - cunning, cautious, and therefore dangerous. He has the same sadistic tendancies as his son, but he tries so hard to control his sick desires (leeches sucking away his passions) so as not to loose his position.

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Considering what he does to the Starks and what a bastard (pun intended) his son is, it's really kind of ridiculous how much I enjoy Roose Bolton as a character. But I do. One of the absolutely best players in the game. While I seriously doubt that Lady Barbrey Dustin will make it into the show, I hope that some element of her description of him will still be included, even if they give it to another character.

Changes or not, Michael McElhatton was great last night (and if the sheer number of Internet freakouts, new Tumblrs, and new YouTube fads like "Roose Trollton" are anything to go by, he's gained substantially more notoriety). He's giving an excellent performance as the Leech Lord (even sans leeches), and I hope that he gets a lot more to do in Season 4.

"A peaceful land. A quiet people. That has always been my rule. Make it yours." (I can just picture him saying this to Iwan Rheon's Ramsay. So good).

"Immediately googles roose trollton"

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to be fair i thought roose was mixed this episode, he was his normal, awesome self played by Michael McElhatton brilliantly throughout the series, and in this episode too, the problems were mainly writing) until the actual massacre itself. I wouldnt be suprised if he just wanted to see the look on catelyn's face before it happened (he is ramsays dad after all, and we get information in the books to say he's done some pretty crazy things, sure caution usually takes priority, but not much could go wrong at this point) either way, i'm happy even if it is a minor breach of character, because we got to see that bit of the wedding which we get in the books with catelyn and that chain mail being the "oh shit" moment. Him running off just seemed a little pussy like at first, but now i realise that that the whole getting in the way of the arrows is a pretty good practical reason. The whole 'the lannisters send there regards' i didnt like that much at all at first, it seemed to quick, and it would've been better if he'd taken his time over it. Still it grew on me, and it doesnt seem so bad and so quick as it was the first time, after a couple more times watching. However, it still wasnt as epic as the books, it was more done for shock value.That seemed to be the story of the whole massacre, it was awesome, one of the best scenes in the show ever, but still not as epic as the books, and more done for shock value, with everything happening quickly.

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On a more serious note, is Roose really a fighter? I thought he was just a survivor. Isn't that why Robb sent him to fight Tywin? Didn't he spend that part of the war strategically retreating? And doesn't he later hide in a wagon for fear of getting shot with a poison arrow by Reed's people? The fact that he scurried out of the room is not out of character.

Further, Catelyn needs someone to slap the hell out of at that point. The need for her character to do that - to a character the TV audience knows - supercedes the need to make Roose Bolton look like a badass. The audience will get to learn more about Roose for a long time to come. That was Cat's final moment. And in my opinion, Roose is not some macho villain - just a sociopath - cunning, cautious, and therefore dangerous. He has the same sadistic tendancies as his son, but he tries so hard to control his sick desires (leeches sucking away his passions) so as not to loose his position.

That's a fair point that I missed. I guess the fact that Roose Bolton has more cruelty in his little finger than all the Freys put together doesn't necessarily mean he is a brave man, but what annoyed me about this adaptation is that it shattered the menacing aura that the show was starting to build up around him. In future series, the Boltons are supposed to be feared, not sneered at. Roose looked like a little bitch.

I understand the choices they made- using Roose as the big "reveal" guy was a neat touch, and that subsequently, he needed to be slapped for the purposes of serving Cat's character, and needed to get out of the line of fire, but honestly, I think Catelyn slapping someone like Lame Lothar- the guy who came to broker the deal would have been a better choice, and a better compromise in terms of preserving the Roose character.

It was a huge departure to have Roose scuttling out of the room away from a woman after being bitch-slapped, instead of dramatically marching into the room at the head of a force of Northerners.

It would have been delicious for Cat to call out his name, for her to look relieved, then look doubtful, for the audiences hopes that Rob and Cat could be saved to pivot on this grey man, for people to dare "hope" (a cruel element lost in this adaptation) and for him to march up to Robb and stab him with a force of Boltons behind him.

Another thing I'm disappointed about is that they didn't reveal "boy"s parentage immediately prior to the betrayal. That would have added to the significance of the moment, making this about more than mere survival for Roose, but about power.

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"A peaceful land. A quiet people. That has always been my rule. Make it yours." (I can just picture him saying this to Iwan Rheon's Ramsay. So good).

Oh God, you've really made me want a scene that mirrors Tywin's first one. The cold, calculating father lecturing the headstrong son. Except at the end it reveals the creature Roose is skinning isn't a deer...

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I threw this pic together this morning:

https://fbcdn-sphoto...773475958_n.jpg

haha this is great!

I haven't watched the final final scene again because god damn but yeah, the way he (Bruuuuce) scuttles away after Cat slaps him kind of cracks me up a bit. All I can hear is Dr. Zoidberg going "woop woop woop!!!"

omg I had almost that exact same thought when watching it a second time, and now forever will
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